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more of Seattle’s best chefs sweating over open fire pits in an idyllic field; are you going to pretend you’re just an especially curious bystander, one who likes to write things down, and then make up a name when they want to shake your hand? Will they treat you so differently back at their restaurants in Seattle that you will be unable to assess whether the place is any good or not?
    For a restaurant reviewer to eat what’s on their plate in the shadow of their wig, then hand down a verdict in an airless vacuum seems strange when meeting the people involved gives insight into their ethos, their interconnections, even our city as a whole. I interviewed about a dozen local chefs and food writers and cheese-shop owners between 2009 and 2012 for the magazine Edible Seattle —interviews at their homes, in which I documented (among other things) the contents of their refrigerators. Ethan Stowell had half a sandwich from Subway. (“It’s a bad sandwich—I’m not gonna lie to you,” he said. “It’s not a good sandwich. It’s only five bucks, though.”) Zephyr Paquette had a bomb-shelter’s worth of home-canned goods, a dog that loved carrots, and a slingshot she was using to shoot corks at the squirrels ravaging her vegetable garden. (Having invaded her home, it was not easy to write later that I did not love the food at her new restaurant, Skelly and the Bean, which closed after less than a year, but it did help me understand the community that helped her build it, and why people like her so very much.)
    For another Edible Seattle interview, I visited Kim Ricketts, a force of nature who’d put Seattle on the map in terms of food-oriented book events, doing 100-plus dinners and parties and readings with the likes of Anthony Bourdain, Michael Pollan, Patricia Wells, Thomas Keller, Jerry Traunfeld, Greg Atkinson, and Langdon Cook. Her home was as if Martha Stewart actually had good taste; she made baked feta rubbed with oregano, and we drank a lot of wine, and she called the owner of Whole Foods crazy and lightly disparaged the University Book Store and said a lot of stuff no one else ever would. Her husband and one of her kids eventually joined us, sitting aroundby the fire. For yet another of these interviews, Christina Choi of Nettletown and I sat out on the deck of her Eastlake apartment, talking about growing up in Seattle and her wild-food-gathering days with Foraged & Found and all sorts of things. She’d done a photo shoot for Seattle Metropolitan earlier that day, and she insisted I stay for dinner to eat the gorgeous photo-shoot coho salmon with a motley crew of people she maybe only half-knew—an architect who’d made the most beautiful meringues ever seen outside a bakery, a woman who talked about a past job nannying for a very, very rich family during which she’d drugged the children to calm them down (at which only Christina and I looked askance).
    Both Kim Ricketts and Christina Choi have since passed away. I was so lucky to get to know them, even just a little—they each had the ability to, in one afternoon, make you feel like part of their family. How could anonymity compare to that?

 
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    T YRANNY : I T’S W HAT’S FOR D INNER
    By Corby Kummer
    From The Atlantic

    In the three-plus decades that senior editor Corby Kummer has been with The Atlantic —earning a slew of writing awards and accolades along the way—he has seen plenty of dining trends come and go. So what’s different about this one?
    â€œD inner? I’m afraid we can’t serve you dinner,” the waiter at Charlie Trotter’s said starchily as we arrived at the celebrated Chicago restaurant. For 25 years, people made special trips from all over the country to brag about the dozens of courses Trotter served on his ever-shifting tasting menus. But as other chefs became more celebrated, the traffic slowed, and Trotter—the first